Music, Teaching, Learning, and Life

Why do we teach the way we do?  When faced with a roomful of students, the easiest course of action is to teach using the same methods we’ve always used.  Change in the classroom is just as difficult as change in any other part of our lives.  For those reasons, I think it’s a little too easy not to ask ourselves the questions, “Are my methods of teaching helping students learn?” or “How could I change my teaching to better serve students?”

I read an interesting article in the Journal of Research in Music Education, October, 2008, about the effectiveness of Curwin hand signs in teaching sight-singing using a group of high school students with an extensive background in the movable do system (Alan C. McClung, author).  McClung came to basically the same conclusion as the authors of five previous studies:  the use of Curwin hand signs when sight-singing had no statistically significant positive affect on sight-singing scores compared to using solfege without the signs.  He strongly urges music educators to consider that although the hand signs may benefit some students, it may put others at a disadvantage.

I only began using ideas from the Kodaly method this year.  It hasn’t been an easy change, but the change itself has energized my teaching.  Now, based on the article I read, I might want to pay less attention to the Curwin hand signs since students are now familiar with them and give more time to teaching the direction of the melody and the accuracy of the intervals they sing.